Urgent Warning About Nonviolent Communication

All right. Listen up, people, because this is important. Now, you may have heard of the recent demise of a certain man named Rosenberg. No, not Heisenberg – Rosenberg.

Marshall Rosenberg was a psychologist who became increasingly disillusioned with a modern mental health care system with its ever-increasing emphasis on diagnostic categories and labels for mental disorders which he found actually got in the way of him identifying with his clients’ humanity and giving them the empathy that they needed to actually heal their underlying emotional trauma.

See, Rosenberg realized that an empathic connection with another human being was the key healing element of the therapeutic relationship. And all the evaluations and the judgments behind the process of diagnosing what’s wrong with somebody actually gets in the way of building an empathic relationship.

Oh, but this wasn’t enough for Rosenberg, was it? Oh, no. He wasn’t satisfied just empowering his clients to express how they were feeling. Rosenberg realized a key facet of human nature, which is that feelings arise in accordance with basic human needs. He realized that all people on the planet have the same fundamental human needs at different points in time that give rise to different feelings at different points in time.

See, Marshall Rosenberg was a big thinker and he asked himself this question: “Why is it that some people seem to enjoy creating violence and suffering in the lives of themselves and other people when other people seem to have more fun and enjoy the process of giving to others and making life more wonderful for them?”

And when he looked at these two different groups, he realized that the big difference between them was the language that they used, both in their own heads and between other people. People who created violence and suffering for others seemed to use a language that used words that alienated themselves from other people, whereas the people who enjoyed the compassion of natural giving seemed to use words that allowed them to empathize with other people and see them as another human being.

But the problem for most of us is that we’ve never been educated into understanding our human needs or our basic feelings, either of ourselves or of the other people around us. In fact, most of us have no vocabulary for human needs and feelings.

So what Marshall Rosenberg did was he put together a system for identifying basic human needs and human feelings and emotions and expressing them clearly and consistently to other people and published it in this subversive manifesto, Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life.

But that wasn’t enough for Marshall Rosenberg. Oh, no. Because he wanted to attack the power structures in societies that seem to keep people oppressed and create violence and unhappiness for the masses.

I mean, imagine what would happen if anyone on the planet was able to get access to this information. Anyone could self-actualize. Leaders that use fear to control the populous would no longer have that power. This would be just an absolute disaster for people in positions of political, social, economic or spiritual power that use that power to oppress others.

I mean, if anyone on the planet could self-actualize and let go of their attachment to violence and enjoying the sufferings of others, then who would watch Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones or the nightly news?

Pharmaceutical companies would go out of business as the market for antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications evaporated as everybody learned to meet their own basic needs through the connections with other people based on empathy and compassion, rather than violence and suffering.

Now, Marshall Rosenberg may be dead, but his followers live on. Even as we speak, tens of thousands of students of nonviolent communication are out there in the world spreading this subversive message to anyone who will listen. They’re out there infiltrating workplaces, families, relationships, spiritual communities, spreading the word about how people can identify feelings and needs, both in themselves and others, to form more compassionate communications that makes life more wonderful for everybody.

Obviously, these people need to be stopped. So here’s a call to action. There’s two things we need to do. The first one is get online, go to your local bookstore, hit Amazon.com, buy up every copy of this subversive manifesto, Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life, and burn it. Whatever you do, do not read this book.

Now, obviously, there aren’t enough of us out there with bonfires to burn every copy of this subversive manifesto in existence. So we’re going to need to enlist the help of our friends, families, colleagues, coworkers, everyone we have contact with. Buy copies of this book and give it to them as well with explicit instructions: “Do not read this book. Burn it.”

Second thing: share this video with everyone you know. Put it on your Twitter feed, your Facebook wall, your Instagram account, even if you could do that. Do it. Spread the message so that we can keep the message of nonviolent communication suppressed.